


Pyrrhic Victory

by corbaccio



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Gen, Introspection, Snapshots
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:40:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28159200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/corbaccio/pseuds/corbaccio
Summary: Even something as insignificant as a pawn could checkmate a king, his grandfather had said. And that Armin had never forgotten.(A series of snapshots of battles lost, though Armin knows how to roll with the punches. Spoilers up to the chapter 135 of the manga.)
Relationships: Armin Arlert & Eren Yeager
Comments: 22
Kudos: 59





	Pyrrhic Victory

**Author's Note:**

> content warning for canon-typical injury. i wouldn't say it's especially gratuitous, but section three in particular refers to when armin got shot in the face, so if you're squeamish about mouth and dental trauma, tread carefully.
> 
> this is very armin-centric.

**i.**

Armin spat out a mouthful of blood. He knew it was rude to spit in public; his grandpa always scowled at people he saw doing so, though at home he would spit his tobacco, and coming in from the smithy his mother would, too, her phlegm blackish with coal smut. Sometimes she would make a deliberate, guttural noise as she cleared her throat, at which his father never failed to flinch. And then she would laugh—a low and rasping laugh that delighted Armin every time—and throw her apron at him. The leather was always warm, from her body and from the forge, and it smelled like cattle. It used to hang on a hook in the kitchen. Armin didn’t know where it was anymore.

He swiped at his nose. If he cried now, he could blame it on the beating, at least. They had been especially vicious this time, but then Armin had been especially insistent. He used to cringe at being called a heretic, but now he embraced it with spiteful conviction. _I’d much rather be a heretic than an idiot._ Sometimes, he really did deserve the punch. 

Grandpa would be upset. He was upset every time, though he never cried like Armin did. Instead he would sigh one of those deep, sad sighs—so much sadder nowadays—and wipe Armin’s face clean with the handkerchief he kept tucked in his sleeve. He sighed very frequently. Last time, as he had cupped Armin’s chin in his aged and shaking hands, soft as beaten suede, he had said, “Sometimes I wonder whether you go looking for trouble.”

He had apologised immediately. But Armin had not fallen silent because the words had stung; it was because they cut straight through to some truth he had not recognised until then. It wasn’t that he liked fighting. Armin was too weak to enjoy the rush of confrontation, as satisfying as it was to see the ruddy bloom of anger on a bully’s face. And the pain could be terrible, bad enough that it kept him up at night. 

Yet—despite the pain, and despite his grandpa’s distant, desperate sadness—it felt too important. For some inexplicable, untouchable reason, he had to do this, as if it were some wrong that Armin had to make right. Since his parents had gone, it seemed more important than ever to talk his blasphemous talk. It was just that Armin didn’t understand himself well enough to explain why.

One quiet morning, years ago, when his parents had left for work and the aftermath of breakfast had been tidied away, his grandpa had taught him how to play chess. Sun had streamed in through the open window. Armin had been on his lap, comfortable beneath the weight of his grandfather’s arm as he reached over to the chequered board on the table. With great patience, he had instilled in him the importance of these rules, what piece could move where, how organised, and how logical, and how unified it all was. 

“Every single one has a role,” he had said, his chest rumbling at Armin’s back, “even the smallest piece.”

The pawn’s shape was anonymous by comparison to the knight, the bishop, the queen. Armin had taken one from the neat identical row, and his palm had been so small that it had poked out from his fist as he held it. Even something as insignificant as a pawn could checkmate a king, his grandfather had said. That Armin had remembered, though it had taken him several sessions more to grasp the rules. 

Yes. He might not have had the words, but Armin knew it was something like that. He would look at his grandfather, and think about his parents, and see the black bruise ringing his eye in the window’s surface, and the pawn would come again into his mind. Small and weak though it might have been. Before a titan, everyone was small and weak. But if a pawn could make it all the way to the opposite edge of the board, then it was possible—unlikely, but still possible—to make it on the other side of the wall.  
  
  
  
  
The boy spat out a mouthful of blood. It spattered dramatically against the dry cobblestone. His name was Eren, wasn’t it? As Armin stared at him, he cleared his throat with the same grotesque, hacking noise that his mother used to make. His own face smarted. They had got to him long before Eren had, but then Armin had never expected someone to charge into his fight in the first place. Especially without forewarning. One moment he had been shoved up against the wall; the next, on his knees, his collar released, as Eren had bowled into them like a spitting cannonball. The boy who’d had his fist in Armin’s face was laid flat, but it hadn’t taken long for the others to recover enough sense to resume the fight.

It rankled, a little—more that this weakness had been seen by someone other than his grandpa—but then it was apparent that Eren had witnessed Armin’s one-sided scuffles before. Several times. Beyond their initial meeting, though, Eren had not asked again why Armin did not run away; he simply accepted it. And, just as simply, he now rushed in to throw a punch where Armin would or could not.

“My dad’s a doctor,” Eren said, briskly, proudly, despite the blood trickling down his chin. To Armin’s eye, it made him look at once very childish and very strong. “You should go see him.”

Armin wanted to say otherwise, because he’d had much worse before, and it looked like Eren had borne the brunt of the beating in his place. But before he had the chance to, Eren took his hand in his and yanked him along the street with such force that he nearly tripped. The refusal died before it could rise in his throat. 

(And, later—after Dr. Jaeger had done no more than his grandpa would have done, which was less treatment than Eren had required with his bloody nose, and after he’d been deposited at home with a frantic mutual exchange of apologies—Armin realised that he had not cried at all. Not from the pain. Not from thinking of his parents, curled up in a miserable ball until he felt whole enough again to stand. Not even at the sting of antiseptic. Sheer surprise had swept it away, and all that was left in his mind was the look of those eyes: a striking, glassy grey, like deep water when it ran clear, and the freckling of blood on Eren’s small and swollen knuckles.)  
  
  
  
**ii.**

Armin spat out a mouthful of blood. Discreetly, into a teacup. He could hear the kettle seethe as it neared the boil. Jean kept looking over at him, short meaningful glances that made Armin’s face itch; when he scratched his cheek, some blood that he’d missed flaked beneath his fingernails. The pain had dulled to a vanishing throb. It wasn’t an unfamiliar pain, though it was difficult to remember the last time he had been hit—deliberately—in the face. As a child it had been a common occurrence; as a trainee, much less frequent, especially if you discounted combat practice. 

Armin was rarely inclined to fight with the people he disliked, these days, and he would never start a physical one even if it ended up that way. He knew his limitations, and usually it was his mouth that was the problem. _You’re just too smart for your own good, huh_. A rhetorical question that Armin sometimes liked to answer just for the way people would baulk when he did. There was only one person he dealt with on a regular basis who felt deserving of a good punch, and it was easier to ignore Floch than it was to engage. When he wasn’t staging coups, at least.

Anyway, it would have felt unfair. Armin was neither especially strong nor co-ordinated, but while he would reel from a blow, he would heal from it faster than any ordinary person could hope to. Though from that perspective, the only person it _would_ be fair to fight was Eren. Armin touched his steaming lip. And Eren was right—that hadn’t been a fair fight at all. In the end, Armin’s body was still what it was, that which it had always been. Weak. Useless. The words stung in a way that they hadn’t in years. He had thought them to himself any number of times, scratching at that rotten itch until it bled, but filtered through Eren’s voice—spoken from his mouth, that face set in an impassive mask—it cut down to the bone. The fury that swallowed him when he thought about Mikasa was worse, but at least it felt solid, an actual blooded emotion. The sadness that lay beneath it was cold and empty; it sapped him of everything. It made Armin want to curl up and die, and there wasn’t the time for that.

“You’re healing pretty slow,” Jean said. It was not a comment of concern. It was a gentle probing. A _go-on-tell-me_ , given extra gravity by the pointed looks he shot Mikasa every five seconds when he was done giving Armin’s face a once-over.

Armin was not in the mood to receive his meaning, not yet. The pain was ebbing, but the wound was still too fresh to speak out loud. Sharing it with an audience, no matter how kind, was intolerable. And Mikasa did not deserve a revisiting of Eren’s behaviour so soon.

“I’m not concentrating, that’s all,” Armin said. He sounded tired even to his own ears. At least he could speak without that wet thickness now; earlier, with his swollen cheek and busted nose, his voice had been like a stranger’s.

Jean had the tact to let it drop, but by the look on his face he would want an answer eventually. Armin glanced at Mikasa. Dry-eyed, her pain managed so tidily when Eren had torn her open with such brutal precision—but her expression was shuttered and blank. There was the intense urge to comfort her, but as he thought it, Armin realised that he had no idea how. Neither defending Eren or damning him made any sense, and the futile punch Armin had thrown must have only made it worse. The haunted look that had come over her as she’d slammed him into the table was impossible to forget.

The whole thing felt so pointless. More than that, it felt insulting. Eren had sought a dialogue only to crush the conversation before it could begin. And now, they were _here_ , in a barred cell with a guard half-asleep against the wall, soldiers and civilians alike sat as though waiting the call to mess, with a stove and a kettle and a cabinet of porcelain. Useful, useless things. 

Armin rubbed at his temples. He was grateful for the Braus family; if they had been alone with Jean and Connie, the confrontation would have been immediate. There certainly wouldn’t have been any tea. He watched as Mr. Braus stoked the fire, his wife setting out cups and saucers with brittle clinks. He could smell it brewing, and it was comforting despite the flat damp scent of cold stone. 

There had been a single, fleeting moment. So brief that Armin could have imagined it, but then he knew the shape of Eren’s emotions too well—he used to wear them so plainly, unashamed of his own intensity, and so unlike the hollow shadow he was now. Armin wanted to believe he had seen it, though a year ago he would never have wished to provoke such raw and real anger on Eren’s face. Even with one eye swollen shut, the shock of pain making him stupid, Armin had recognised that look. 

The distance between them might have stretched too far. Eren might have resembled cold steel more than a man. But there was something of him—of the Eren they knew—sheltered within that fortress, and maybe he could yet be reached. He had to be. The alternative was too unbearable to consider.  
  
  
  
  
Eren spat out a mouthful blood. It had hurt, but in a dull and expected way. He had seen it his memories, in his dreams. He had chewed on their anger and their upset until it tasted of nothing; he had known the words to say without having to think them. It was like reaching for the pan handle when you knew to anticipate the burn. There had been a bright, bursting sensation in his nose, and the hot flush of blood—his teeth cut into his cheek from the blow—and then its familiar metallic tang. Even if he hadn’t known to expect it, Eren had bitten himself too many times for it to be a shock. He had been hit too many times—kicked, struck, thrown, his teeth rattling like dice—for it to even make him flinch.

His face was steaming already. It would not take long to heal, mere minutes; there wasn’t any pain by now. One of the Jaegerists posted outside had given him a towel, likely snatched from the kitchen. Eren wiped his face. Glass crunched underfoot from the bottles knocked clear off the cabinet when Armin had staggered against it. Him and Mikasa had left tracks in the puddling wine: muddy smears where they had kneeled, bootprints stamped up to the door. Eren looked at them. You could tell by the pattern the way they had moved in tandem—Mikasa, close enough to shoulder Armin’s weight; Armin, a limp evident by the drag of his left foot. 

Something in Eren’s chest twinged, a fishhook catching flesh. He ignored it. If he tried hard enough, Eren could imagine he had never felt anything at all.  
  
  
  
**iii.**

Armin spat out a mouthful of blood. There were fragments of bone in it. There wasn’t much about Armin’s body that disturbed or disgusted him these days, but that could do it: he felt a ripple of nausea unsettle his stomach. Though maybe that was from the broken tooth he had swallowed earlier. A wet and ragged gasp had sucked the damn thing—loose already, and with a new tooth pushing beneath—free from its socket before he could think to choke on it. That had been one of the most unpleasant sensations of Armin’s life, and he had felt plenty of awful things in nineteen years. But he had learned a long time ago that there was always some novel horror lurking around the corner; even the nasty surprises were hardly surprising anymore.

The nausea passed quickly enough, at least. Armin folded up the cloth he’d spat into so he wouldn’t have to look at the bloody clot any longer. The shots to the chest and stomach had felt like nothing in comparison—pellets from a peashooter—to the sharp, sheer shock of a bullet to the face. Even with his jaw most of the way to healed, it pulsed with pain, or maybe it was just the memory of pain, an echo reverberating through him even now. A rifle’s kickback was bad enough when you were the one doing the shooting; it felt like the blow had rattled the very meat of his brain.

Really, Armin felt like a sorry sack of shit, so someone like the captain might say. His scheme against the Jaegerists had failed. It had been a poor and panicked plan to start with. Each time he closed his eyes, he saw Connie’s face splitting with desperate horror; he saw Daz collapse into the water below, his own hand reaching over the edge. Samuel, his head blown open like a dropped fruit. Even through the hot blurring agony it had been so clear. Other squadmates must have died at the hands of Reiner and Annie, who themselves had been lucky to survive. Meanwhile Eren was obliterating the world, crushing not just most of humanity but all flora and fauna with it. And that, Armin supposed, was meant to be freedom. It was a _kind_ of freedom—the most meaningless kind, just blind destruction and rage, a child stomping a pheasant’s nest for the mere fact that it existed on the ground and that its eggs were so fragile. Kill, kill, kill… nothing new there.

( _That’s not fair_ , Armin thought. And besides, it wasn’t true. Eren had never been so aimlessly cruel. It used to be that Eren would take a spider up in his hands when another had wanted to step on it. That he would watch birds fly and feed and sing for the simple pleasure of it with Armin, whether it was dusk or dawn. Eren, who had looked at the sweetest child settled on their mother’s hip and the most hideous spitting feral cat and shown tenderness to both. Not obviously—sometimes just in the softening of his gaze—but undeniably _there_ , no matter how famous his temper. Armin had seen it. Mikasa had seen it. First-hand, they had witnessed how Eren would reach for the lonely, the broken, the lost, and pull them up again into the light or sit with them in the miserable dark. That was just the kind of person he was. That he had been.)

It was such an absurd catalogue of tragedies that mourning was beyond him. Armin felt simply numb. Crying would help nothing; it wouldn’t even be cathartic. The only person who deserved to see just how upset he was—a deep sunken pit with no bottom, blackness upon blackness—was beyond reach, in every sense of the word. And if Mikasa’s tears had not moved Eren, then Armin doubted his own would have any effect.

There was only one option left, then. No curling up to die, no crawling back to Paradis for a traitor’s welcome. This would be nothing so sweet as victory, not redemption nor revenge. Certainly it did not feel righteous. It felt like a dirty job that needed cleaning up after, and though the damage could not be wiped away as easily as that, it had to be done. It must be done.

Armin looked down at his shirt. Two tattered holes, each with blood blooming outwards like an open flower. He would need a new one.  
  
  
  
  
Three years ago, Armin had sailed out from Paradis’ coastline in a rowboat, alone, to a buoy that had been set there some days before. So far out that he had barely been able to see land, never mind the people on it. The waves had been gentle, and more gentle still the longer he rowed until they hardly rocked the boat at all. It had been a perfect day. The sky and the sea the same periwinkle blue, the sun a white-hot razor cutting across the water. Armin had known what to expect. There would be an immense release of heat and pressure. He would kill any marine life in the vicinity, any birds that flew overhead. If there had been houses along the nearest stretch of land, the force would have stripped the roofs from them even with the distance. 

He had fired his signal and then he had waited for the response. _This is for something bigger than myself._ He had kept repeating that to himself; he’d had to. It was for the lives of the people on Paradis. His fellow soldiers, among them those that he loved, and any number of unknown innocent civilians. Mothers and children. It had not been comforting necessarily—the thought had made him sweat, and it still did—but duty had driven him where courage could not. 

Armin had thought about fierce rage, and all the hate buried inside of himself, and the cruel things he had known in his life. He had remembered Bertholdt in Shiganshina, when he was nine years old and when he was fifteen. The slitting of his hand had been easy by then, the twist of the knife fluent with habit. Armin had exploded upwards, outwards. The force of it had pulled at his fingernails, his eyelashes, the blood in his veins, even as he had been enveloped in a fortress of hot flesh. High above, he had watched the water surge and roll away from him in frothing waves. As the Colossus, they had seemed no larger than the breakers that had hit the beach that morning, but they must have been large enough to sink any warship. Not that any ship would have survived the blast to start with.

Armin’s life was small. It always had been; one man’s life amounted to nothing. His tactical value eclipsed it to such a degree that it was laughable, and during those first few months after inheriting, Armin had had one near-constant thought as he struggled beneath Paradis’ expectations: this was how it was for Eren. How it must have been, all this time. The revelation should not have been so revelatory. Armin had witnessed the truest colour of Eren’s suffering so often, and he had ached for him every time—lost sleep and sense for him—but it was only with the weight of this power that he finally understood. 

It had been the most secret and shameful point of pride, to imagine that he understood Eren better than anyone else. The same as when Eren used to speak about their dream like it was the most important thing in his world. When little else had brought comfort, Armin would let those words play again and again in his mind. Selfishly, seizing that brittle truth like it was the only thing tying him to the earth. Armin had never pretended or aspired to be an inspiration, but that he might have contributed to Eren’s limitless passion, to have directed it in even the smallest way—it used to fill him with something like strength. Something like hope. 

Around them were miles of clear and placid water. Not quite periwinkle blue, but beautiful nevertheless. The breeze rolling in off the ocean lifted Annie’s hair from her face. It still felt strange to see her in motion—nostalgic, almost. Though her eyes, as she watched him now, were brighter than Armin could ever remember them being when they were trainees. 

“The world of the unknown… it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, was it?” she said. 

The words were blunt, but she did not sound scornful; Annie spoke with surprising softness. In this surreal and impossible peace, Armin felt separated from his bitterness, his misery, his fear. There was nothing now to do but wait, anyway, and to talk. 

He had to cede the point.

“No. It wasn’t the world we dreamed of,” Armin admitted, and despite the numbing pall he felt the burn of gathering tears. “But… I still want to believe that there’s a world we don’t about yet out there.”

Armin had to look away as he said it. It was too raw, too naïve; it embarrassed him, because it was the most honest thing he had said in days. But when he found the strength to look at Annie’s face, there was none of the frustration that he had expected, nor disdain. There was not even pity in her tender gaze. Instead, she just looked at him like she knew, and like she had always known, some truth that Armin had never dared admit even to himself.  
  
  
  
**iv.**

There was no blood. Armin could not spit or cough or clear his throat; he could not breathe. The cloying dark of the titan’s mouth closed him in on all sides, humid and horrible, but he was losing even the sense of his own skin. The throbbing pain from the stress on his jaw was fading. His thoughts slipped away as if beneath brackish water. 

Armin had known it, too. Like Annie, and surely like Mikasa. A knowledge so selfish and so certain that he had not let it see the light of day, though it would seep out through the cracks when the questions were asked. _Will you kill Eren? Can you? Just what is your plan, Armin?_ His plans were not plans, more pipedreams. That Eren could be pulled out of himself, for whatever that was worth or what that could mean, if it were even possible in the first place.

It was too late. Each step a misstep leading to this very moment. The line from the present to the past was too thin and too fragile to walk back along; there would be no miraculous undoing. There was nothing left to salvage from the wreck. Even to allow it any consideration had to be a sin, as if millions of lives could be so easily put aside. And yet, Armin had considered it. And yet, Armin had _wanted_ it, more than he had ever wanted anything in his life. 

Throwing away his own humanity had not been easy, but he had not hesitated to do so. A necessary swap for Eren’s safety or Jean’s survival, and one willingly made. His life and his dreams—that had been a greater challenge, stifled by fear, but Armin had managed to surrender them, too. Why should it be that giving up on Eren was so much more difficult? Not just difficult—it was unthinkable. It went against not just Armin's nature but nature itself, a cruel parody of the reality he had been so convinced of. Eren, throwing open the window and setting the spider on the edge of the sill, as gently as if he were handling crystal. Eren, hearing a jackdaw’s cry and asking Armin if he knew it. His hand settled on the crest of Armin's shoulder. Teasing the frayed ends of Mikasa's scarf. Rising from a dream of his mother with hot tears spilling down his face. 

Eren. His hair long and lank, streaming into the dark as Mikasa lifted him from Liberio. The glimpse of his knuckles, bruised from the force of the blow, Armin’s blood like a stamp on the back of his hand. His voice echoing in an empty world. The look on his face. The look on his face. That look on Eren’s face. _Put your hands back on the table._

Perhaps this was as futile as that thrown punch had been. A vain effort in a fight that could never be fair. Eren’s name had lingered in his mind for only a moment—but a moment’s hesitation was all it took. Any soldier worth their salt knew that. Armin had had it beaten into him over and over again, mostly through painful experience, and still he had let his faith in Eren override even that most fundamental truth. 

Maybe this was always going to be Armin’s choice. One thoughtlessly made, but his all the same. That was the decision that Eren had made, too. Their lives, their freedom (his life, his freedom), in exchange for the rest of the world’s. Whenever this had begun—whether with that book, or with his mother’s death, or at the touch of Historia’s hand—the inevitable and terrible trigger for this inevitable and terrible fate had been set off long ago. No one could change that which was written in the untouchable stars. The poison in the groundwater reached too deep to be purged by human hands.

Armin had thought that he had known despair. He had been desperate so many times in his life. Now, as he drifted into the nothingness, he realised that it was so much colder, and so much lonelier, than he could ever have imagined.  
  
  
  
**v.**

(But then, hope could be cold and lonely, too.)

Two thousand years. A barren expanse of sand, as large as any ocean, and the silhouettes of two children against a glowing sky. 

It seemed impossible that Eren should ever have been so small. In Armin’s memory, though they had been closer in height back then, Eren had always towered above him. He had seemed to tower above almost everyone: the boys near double his size that beat him with ease, the Garrison soldiers that laughed at his blistering ire. Only the wall had dwarfed Eren beneath its immovable shadow. 

Eren had said that there was no need to speak anymore. He had always been stubborn that way. But then, Armin could be just as stubborn when he wanted to be. Eren did not have to listen; sometimes it felt like he had not listened to him in years. Still, in this impossible frozen world of sand and stars and perfect silence where he could not shift, where he was stripped of all but his useless human skin, talking was the one thing left in Armin’s arsenal. A mouthful of blood, a mouthful of words. It had been that way since the beginning. So it would be till the end.

**Author's Note:**

> each fic more indulgent than the last, i know, but with the manga apparently some months from ending and a serious aversion to writing my thesis, i need to get this stuff out of my brain double-quick. with chapter 135, i have zero clue where the story will go, but i do want reason to hope—whether that involves armin and mikasa in paths or armin shifting or something else entirely. i know people find it frustrating that he hesitates after all that’s happened, that he still wants to talk it out, but for me, that armin wants to believe in eren even now... ugh. it’s such a human, humanising flaw, born from such an intense and desperate place. despite everything, him and mikasa both love eren so much. (and talking is armin's thing! hasn't his whole arc been about understanding where his strengths lie, that even such nonstandard strengths are valuable?)
> 
> but i digress. i could write the longest a/n and still say nothing worthwhile! thanks so much for reading. i hope you enjoyed it at least a little.
> 
> (eta because i realise it's rather vague in the fic: the shifting scene in part iii is meant to depict armin's first trial attempt at the colossus' explosive transformation.)


End file.
